The court ruled 5-4 that, as The Hill.com put it, “one legal gun owner may not acquire a firearm on behalf of another — a practice known as "straw" purchasing.

The case heard by the high court involved a Virginia police officer, Bruce Abramski, who bought a gun, a Glock 19 handgun, for his uncle. The police officer, who could get a discount on guns, bought the gun in Virginia. He then transferred it to his uncle, who lived in Pennsylvania, through a second licensed dealer in the state.

The Obama administration successfully prosecuted Abramski for two felonies. The Justice Department said that the same federal background check form where Abramski indicated that he wasn’t a straw purchaser involved perjury as well as for providing false information to the gun dealer who sold the gun.

The five Justices who supported Obama’s prosecution, claimed: “That information helps to fight serious crime. When police officers retrieve a gun at a crime scene, they can trace it to the buyer and consider him as a suspect.”

2 Comments:

As an attorney, I never really saw this as a case about gun control. The very specific facts of this case involve a man who simply lied on a federal form signed under penalty of perjury. As a general rule, I don't care about whether such a lie was an "innocent" lie or an intentional one (so that the buyer could get the peace officer discount on the gun). At some point in America, we need to understand that it's wrong to lie. This is what the media missed in the whole Bill Clinton impeachment -- it wasn't about him getting off with an intern. It was all about not telling the truth under oath (penalty of perjury). You may object to the federal government collecting this information -- but as of right now, they are collecitng it, and when I say something under "penalty of perjury" I had better be saying the truth. So much of America operates on the honor system, and somewhere along the way we as a people relagated "honor" and "truth" to a dustbin. That being said, there was a circuit court of appeals split on the issue (one court adopting a "no harm no foul" approach and the other of "strict liability". I'm personally glad that the Supreme Court said that whatever the reason, it's never right to lie on a sworn statement.

I remember at the end of WWYY the UK debated whether to continue the National ID card. The idea was dropped when someone pointed out that the only crime "solved" by the ID cards was - the forging of ID cards.